1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to computer system management. More particularly, it relates to a cache-based system management architecture useful for automatic software distribution/update, system administration/maintenance such as optimization and backup, data recovery, mobile computing, and so on.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today's computers, their software and hardware components, require constant updates and frequent upgrades. System management is complex, costly, and critical to the security and proper functioning of any computer network. Maintaining/managing a computer system, regardless of its size, can be a burden and perhaps a daunting task to many people.
The tasks of system management include hardware deployment, software installation, continuous security patches and software upgrades, system backups, as well as recoveries from virus attacks, hardware failures, and other forms of disasters. Unlike server machines that can be centralized, desktop machine management is necessarily distributed. For example, a user may need to access her computer at work, on the road, and from home. Moreover, employees of a company may be distributed all around the globe, making system management an even more complex problem.
Distributed systems are notorious for being hard to manage. To ensure that systems are up to date, many system administrators and consumers alike rely on patch management, ranging from operating system update to specialized commercial packages. None of the existing products available today can, however, autonomously decide what patches to apply/install on what computer and how the patches interact with software programs already installed on that particular computer. Varieties in computer configurations and many other factors such as protocols and network connections make it very difficult to design a reliable and versatile system management tool with universally applicable policies and constraints. As such, patches can fail to apply correctly or interact poorly with installed software.
To make software management more uniform and reliable, many companies use disk imaging to guarantee that all the desktops have the same configuration. Imaging is time consuming and disruptive, as it requires the machine to be shut down and entire partitions rewritten, limiting how often updates can be propagated.
Some enterprises utilize the remote display technology, e.g., Citrix® and Microsoft® Windows Terminal Server, to give users remote access to centrally managed machines. However, remote display provides much worse interactive performance than local execution and is sensitive to network disruptions.
In many consumer computer products and services, the burden of system management is relieved or minimized with the introduction of fixed function computer appliances such as TV set-top boxes or digital video recorders (DVRs). A drawback is that these simple fixed function computer appliances are not designed and thus cannot tackle the complex system management issues discussed above.
Clearly, there is a continuing need in the art for a better, more reliable system management architecture that is easy to manage, secure, and supportive of mobile computing regardless of discrepancies in computer configurations and computing environments. The present invention addresses this need.